There are essentially two reasons as to why we as a society create and believe false narratives. First, the concept of “Confirmation Bias” runs rampant in our society. Shahram Heshmat, an associate professor at the University of Illinois asserts that the phenomenon known as “Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true”. Essentially, we constantly hear and listen to what we want to hear and listen to in order to affirm our own beliefs, even though they may be incorrect. We embrace the false narrative because we hold emotional attachments to our beliefs. Robert Trivers a renowned evolutionary and behavioral biologist explained that we deceive ourselves through this strong emotional attachment to our beliefs, leading us down a spiral of irrationality of the highest order to preserve the views we cherish. Moreover, scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson contend that people “will accept whatever they hear, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research”. However, our confirmation bias is not the only mindset that remains pervasive in society. In his New York Times bestselling book, Factfulness, Swedish statistician, physician, and academic, Hans Rosling explains that we constantly distort our perception of the world through 10 instincts, ranging from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Rosling outlines the fact that we just don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by predictable biases. In a world where we consistently and constantly consume any and practically all information fed to us, regardless of source, the plague of confirmation biases and the distortion of the reality has become a global epidemic.
As a result of this epidemic, our societies are suffering. Essentially, there are two effects our false narrative mindsets have. First, we create and embrace an inaccurate perception of society. Because we are so hell-bent on affirming our own beliefs, all other beliefs become virtually non-existent for us, making our biases an absolute viewpoint. Rosling explains that our biases distort our realities to the point where the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might perceive and embrace. Our false narrative affection has even reached a point to which a chimpanzee choosing answers on questions about the state of the world, at random, will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. A chimpanzee, really? Moreover, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Diane Barth explains that “even when we know that the bias of previous beliefs might be affecting our judgment and our relationships, we still stick with those old beliefs”. Unfortunately sometimes, our attachments to our confirmation biases translate into another level of inaccurate perceptions of society, proving to be harmful to the entire human race. The concept of extremism is often created and perpetuated through our confirmation biases. Joe Whittaker, a research fellow for the International Center for Counter-Terrorism writes that When an individual’s network becomes isolated from broader society, it can consequently twist into an extremist echo chamber. Essentially, our views are polarized through such echo-chambers of information leading us to formulate radical, extreme perspectives of our world. Unfortunately, this extremity creates a threat to the stability of our communities. In his study “Cyber-Extremism: Isis and the Power of Social Media”, Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University Imran Awan explains that the Internet is becoming the virtual playground for extremist views and act as an echo chamber, whereby extremist thoughts are populated, redistributed, disseminated and reinforced. Sadly, for one American teenager, the echo chambers online proved to be too much to overcome. Ali Amin, a 17 year old from Virginia wanted to learn more about the Islamic state. Amin went online and found a virtual community filled with propaganda and polarized views waiting for him. He fell into the trap, developing online relationships with Islamic state supporters and propagandists across the globe, who told Ali a false narrative and consistently supplemented him with polarized information to skew his perspective of the world. Ali Amin, at 17 years old became a radicalized supporter of the Islamic state. After pleading guilty to providing material support to a terrorist group Ali was arrested and jailed for 11 years. In court, he lamented that “By assimilating into the Internet world instead of the real world {and buying into the false narrative}, I became absorbed in a ‘virtual’ struggle while disconnecting from what was real: my family, my life and my future.” Ali gave up years of his life because of his belief in a false narrative, but we must ask ourselves, what are we giving up when we constantly buy into our confirmation biases, and perceive our entire world as something it is not?
Although the false narrative epidemic may be pervasive in society, there is a simple enough solution that everyone can adhere to in order to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias in our world. In order to do so, we must adopt a method known as “considering the opposite”. In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, editor JM Olejarz contends that the antidote to our biases lie in considering the opposite. Essentially, whenever faced with a decision or a certain viewpoint, we must ask ourselves what would’ve happened if you’d made the opposite choice. To do this we must first, gather the information we would need to defend this opposite view, and compare it with the information used to support your original decision. In light of this new information, we must then reevaluate our viewpoints in light of the bigger information set. Our perspectives may still be incomplete, but it will be much more balanced and unbiased then before.